• After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart we announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore and the iMore forums will be closing as of November 1st, 2024.

Set iPhone up as new without losing data?

I

iMore Question

Set iPhone up as new without losing data

Hey,

Have spoken to AppleCare today about my iPhone 5S's terrible battery life. It seems to drop from 100% - approx 72% in less than 2 hours with very light use. I have checked battery stats, closed apps in the background, totally disabled background app refresh. Turn off bluetooth etc when not in use, keep brightness low. All that good stuff. No luck. Apple have done battery diagnostics on my device and say the battery is in good health.

I have also tried backing up, wiping and restoring from backup, no luck either.

After explaining all this to Apple, they state that all that's left. is to wipe the device and set up as a new phone. I'm more than happy to do that but must be able to not lose any data.

The majority of my data is cloud based so it's just a case of signing into an account and all my data is available. Another big chunk can be downloaded due to it being stored by an app in iCloud so that's no problem either.

I am now left with a small number of things where the data is stored locally on the device. An example of these are:

- Messages
- Health
- Wallet
- Some game save data

I know that the Health app can export it's data to an XML file but there is no option to reimport after I set my phone up as new.

All Apple leave me with is in either of the two following scenarios:

- Live with a bad battery life phone
- Force me to lose some of my own data

I think this is absolutely unacceptable to be honest. I'm a web developer and this is like saying to a client of mine: "Well, either live with a slow and badly performing website OR lose some of you data that you have spent your time creating." - I can't say that! Not good at all.

Is there a better way? There surely has to be?

Kind regards,
Neil
 

Just_Me_D

Ambassador Team Leader, Senior Moderator
Moderator
Jan 8, 2012
60,414
884
113
Visit site
Re: Set iPhone up as new without losing data

No, there isn't. If you want to cover all of the bases, you will have to restore and set it up as new. Yes, you will lose your messages and possibly your health data. The information stored in your the Wallet app can be put back. For instance, your credit/debit card and value cards, etcetera. Game data that does not backup to iCloud or something will indeed be lost. Having said that, which is more important to you. Possibly improving the battery life on your current iPhone or the data you mentioned? Another alternative would be to get a newer model iPhone.
 

Latest posts

Trending Posts

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
262,069
Messages
1,773,544
Members
441,382
Latest member
Mohammadreza